The runner had just passed the same area along the Santa Fe Trail on the East side of Fountain Creek about 30 minutes earlier at 10:30 a.m. and hadn’t seen the dead man.

Several other people using the trail soon gathered near the body. Colorado Springs police were called.

The dead man had long shaggy, graying hair. He had been stabbed several times.

The amount of bleeding at the location where he was found suggested it was the same spot where he had been attacked, just south of Cimmaron Bridge.

A perimeter was set up. The El Paso County coroner’s office was called and the crime scene was searched.

The bearded dead man was a well-known transient, whose campsite was about three-quarters of a mile away.

John Vincent Knudsen was described by family as somewhat of a gypsy.

After his birth in Fort Ord, Calif., in 1956 Knudsen traveled through Europe and the United States as his father was frequently transferred to new U.S. Army assignments.

“These years of traveling, seeing new places, meeting new people and experiencing new things continued to influence John throughout the remainder of his life,” family members would write in an obituary.

He had gone throughout the country as a long-haul driver. He once worked in construction.

“John’s love for his dogs is legendary,” the obituary says.

Everywhere he went he was flanked by Reuben, Rusty or Booger Ray, his canine friends.

The early-morning confrontation led into the parking lot of the Brunswick Zone blowing alley at 999 N. Circle Drive. where it became a full-fledged melee. The fist-fight turned into a knife and gun fight.

The combatants jumped in at least four different cars and a chase ensued that quickly turned into a running gun battle along a normally quiet residential neighborhood of small homes.

As usual I was working the Saturday morning crime shift that July 9, 2011 at The Denver Post. I drove to Colorado Springs.

At the corner of Mission and Tia Juana streets, about a block from the bowling alley, tire treads crisscrossed pools of blood.

I walked down an alley behind a row of homes just off of Tia Juana Street. It wasn’t difficult to find people willing to describe what happened. People were in their back yards talking to neighbors about what had taken place the night before.

It was tough to get anyone to give their names for the article, though. They were afraid that the people capable of the extreme violence they had witnessed could come back and attack them.

Many were asleep when they heard what sounded like a drag race on their street, punctuated by the sounds of gunshots and frantic screaming and taunts.

“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Doug heard a man yell near the south end of the 800 block of Tia Juana. Cars were screeching and crashing.

In apparent answer to the call came a succession of loud pops, said Doug, a Navy veteran. He heard at least two different calibers of guns being fired.

“I heard some cars squealing,” Larry, who lives on the street, told me. “Then I heard what I thought were fireworks. Pow, pow, pow, pow. Bullets were flying everywhere. I heard screaming.”

About 100 feet north on Tia Juana, Leticia, who asked that her last name not be used, said she saw a bald man slam on the brakes in the street in front of her house, get out of a blue car, fire a gun several times straight up into the air and curse loudly.

” ‘Now come on (expletives),’ he yelled,” Leticia said. She also saw two other bald men fist fighting farther up the street.

Her neighbor June said she heard what sounded like a car crash.

She dashed to her window and lifted the blinds just in time to see a young man about 18 years old jump out of a white Dodge Neon at the corner of Tia Juana and Mission and flee from several cars that had boxed his car in.

Christopher Enoch Abeyta was seven months old when someone took him from his crib at the foot of his parents’ bed in the early morning hours of July 15, 1986 and disappeared.

Since then, a nasty legal battle has erupted in El Paso County District Court between the parents and sister of Christopher and his father’s former mistress, Emma Corrine Bradshaw of Castle Rock.

It is an untidy story that revolves around a longstanding affair between Bradshaw, now 66, and Christopher’s father, Gil Abeyta, now 72. A lawsuit and a counterclaim have been filed in El Paso County District Court.

Several of Christopher’s family members have openly said they believe that Bradshaw had something to do with the infant’s disappearance. Bradshaw claims that she had nothing to do with Christopher’s disappearance and that the family’s baseless and relentless pursuit of her got her fired and is now is making her life miserable.

Much of what is known about the evidence the Abeyta family believes implicates Bradshaw as Christopher’s kidnapper is found in an e-mail that the boy’s sister, Denise Alves, wrote to Bradshaw’s boss, Robert Spicer, on Feb. 13, 2013. The letter was submitted as an attachment to Brashaw’s lawsuit.

The e-mail explained to Spicer that Emma had been arrested about seven years before Christopher Abeyta’s disappearance for stalking and harassment of another married man she was having an affair with. When the Pueblo potter “wanted to break things off with her, she threatened his children.”

In a separate case two years later, Charles Raymond Trent, then 40, filed a police report on May 14, 1981 claiming that someone had punctured his waterbed in his bedroom, causing it to leak onto his floor and through the roof. It caused between $1,500 and $2,000 in damage. There was no sign of forced entry, he told a Pueblo police officer. He added that it could have been Emma Bradshaw, his girlfriend, the police report says.

“The victim said he has been trying to get rid of her,” the officer wrote in his report.

Emma Corrine Bradshaw denied she was the one who slashed the bed.

Two days later on May 16, 1981, Bradshaw called 911, according to a police report. Bradshaw told a police officer that she had recently received a series of anonymous phone calls. The caller, a man, repeatedly made an obscene statement and then would say, “Keep away or something else will happen!”

On the night that part-time model Kara Nichols disappeared, she was scurrying to put makeup on and get ready for a modeling appointment with a Denver photographer.

Kara Nichols

Nichols, 19, lived in a small Colorado Springs home with three men she was renting a room from. Two of the men, who were in their mid to late 20s and worked on road construction crews, were on a trip out of town. Tara told the youngest of her roommates that a girlfriend was going to pick her up for the modeling gig.

Minutes later he saw a dark sedan pulling away from the home and assumed that Kara’s ride had arrived.

That was on Oct. 9, 2012. Kara has not been seen since then. Investigators suspect someone posing as a photographer may have harmed her.

Her mother, Julia Nichols, who lives in Chicago, says her normally very social daughter, who had been calling her twice a week before she vanished, has not contacted her or any of her friends since that day.

“I try to cling to some hope that she is still alive. The more time that goes along the more I face the possibility that she is dead,” Nichols said. “It’s one of these things where you can’t believe it’s happening while its unfolding in front of you.”

Though ugly truths have surfaced since her daughter’s disappearance, Nichols recalls the bright, beautiful girl as she was when she lived at their home.

Kara grew up in a loving, middle class home. She has a brother who is two years older than her, and a sister two years younger.

Growing up, Kara always had a pet, whether it was a hamster, a cat or a dog.

Kara has a great sense of humor and was very talented.

Kara would draw elaborate sketches of models in beautiful gowns. As she got older she won several school and community art competitions. To build on her talent, her parents enrolled her in private art lessons.

The pretty young girl also had her trials, starting when she became a teenager. Her mother recalls a radical change in her daughter’s behavior that she believes could be linked to mental illness.

Donald Robert Laabs had distinguished himself in one of the most dangerous areas of police work. He was an undercover officer who posed as a drug buyer to catch drug dealers.

Sgt. Donald Robert Laabs of the Manitou Springs Police Department

The undercover officer had made scores of drug arrests.

On the day of Laabs’ death he was rewarded for his tenacity by being promoted to detective sergeant in the Manitou Springs Police Department.

By all rights it was a day of celebration for the 28-year-old officer. But on that day, Dec. 18, 1975, Laabs’ career and life would end in a possible undercover drug buy. Whoever killed him has not been brought to justice.

Laabs had worked several years as a police officer in New Mexico and Wyoming before working in Boulder County and Pueblo.
In Boulder County he worked on a commission basis for the Longmont Police Department.

He was paid between $172 and $180 to make six arrests.

Because of the commissions defense attorneys questioned his motivation for making arrests. It was as though he was a bounty hunter when he “entrapped” defendants into buying drugs.

Defense attorney Roger Stevens, who represented four Longmont youths arrested in Laabs’ sting, said Laabs begged them to buy two “lids” of marijuana.

“He had a financial interest in making arrests,” Stevens had argued.

At a 1973 Boulder County Court hearing, Longmont Police Chief Carroll Hebrew said Laabs had worked for him for only 10 days in September of 1972 and solved six cases during that time span.

Laabs later solved 80 drug cases for the Pueblo Police Department. It was not clear by a Saturday, Dec. 20, 1975 article whether Laabs was paid on a commission basis at the time.

Before the unit was disbanded in 1973, Laabs also worked for the Metro Enforcement Group, a state-wide unit that investigated and solved drug cases across Colorado.

A series of events in 1994 led Colorado Springs police to call Michael Ervin Berreth a person of interest in the disappearance of his ex-wife.

According to surviving Colorado Springs police records, detectives believe Gloria Berreth was the victim of violence.

A woman answering Michael Berreth’s cellular phone Saturday, Sept. 7, 2013, said that he is not interested in commenting about his former wife’s disappearance.

The turbulence in the marriage between Gloria and Michael Berreth was documented in court records in the months leading up to her disappearance.

Gloria Berreth filed a restraining order against Michael Berreth, a former Army soldier, on April 22, 1994, in Colorado Springs.

Authorities filed a misdemeanor charge against Michael Berreth on May 7, 1994, for allegedly violating the restraining order. He was arraigned on the charge on June 16, 1994 before El Paso County Judge Caroline Benham.

A day before Michael Berreth was to appear in Benham’s court for trial, Gloria Berreth reported that her ex-husband violated the restraining order a second time. He was hit with a new charge.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.